NFL Power Rankings Week 9
by Robert Ferringo - 11/3/2020

One of the defining characteristics of this NFL season is the massive inequality between the top and bottom tiers. The good teams are really, really good, and the bad teams are completely and totally pathetic. This flies in the face of the NFL’s structure, which is to promote parity, but it seems like a 2020 truism.

NFL Power Rankings Week 8
by Robert Ferringo - 10/30/2020

So, the reason that this week’s Power Rankings are late is because I spent most of Thursday without power and without Internet. What I was able to cobble together from my phone and some time at Panera Bread was used to finalize my actual card for the weekend, so I had to push this back until today.

NFL Power Rankings Week 7
by Robert Ferringo - 10/22/2020

The ‘under’ was the big winner in the NFL last week, with 10 of 14 games staying ‘under’ the total. That was able to stem the high-scoring, high-rising tide of ‘over’ wagers cashing early in the season. And now the question is pretty clear: was last week the beginning of an ‘under’ avalanche that continues through the rest of the season or merely a blip on the radar as the NFL’s highest scoring season continues?

NFL Power Rankings Week 6
by Robert Ferringo - 10/15/2020

Each team should set up its own bubble – a quarantined area for all players and essential support personnel – in its home city immediately. The players should be restricted to team facilities and that’s it. These guys travel on chartered flights and it is not difficult to quarantine for the 24 necessary hours in visiting cities. Really, it’s not that difficult for these players to stay restricted to the field, either their own or a visitor’s, for the rest of the season.

NFL Power Rankings Week 5
by Robert Ferringo - 10/8/2020

We’ve already seen the beginnings of the The Purge, as coaches and quarterbacks suffer the consequences of early season struggles. Most of these moves are acts of desperation (like firing Bill O’Brien). The rest (like benching Dwayne Haskins) are belated attempts to rectify mistakes that never should’ve happened.

NFL Power Rankings Week 4
by Robert Ferringo - 10/1/2020

Apparently the NFL decided that professional football should be more like Big 12 football. The overriding story of the first three weeks of the season – besides the Covid-19 tightrope walking that everyone is doing – is that scoring is up. Way up. Astronomically up. Teams are combining to average 49.4 points per game through the first three weeks. That is up 16 percent from the first three weeks of last season and 22 percent from the average of the previous 20 years.

NFL Power Rankings Week 3
by Robert Ferringo - 9/24/2020

I’m going to keep this short and sweet this week. I have taken my family on vacation for the first time in 2020, and I’m going to keep my focus where it needs to be: on producing a third straight winning football week and extending my +3,170 football run. I’m full steam ahead with my research and handicapping, but that leaves me a little less time to explain the birds and the bees of Week 2 and Week 3 in the NFL to you.

NFL Power Rankings Week 2
by Robert Ferringo - 9/17/2020

The time between Week 1 and Week 2 of the NFL season is one of my favorite times of the sports betting year. We have seven months between the Super Bowl in February and the start of the regular season in September. In those seven months, everyone and their sister has some kind of opinion about what the following season will entail. The NFL gets analyzed and overanalyzed and hyper-overanalyzed until we get to the point where people have talked themselves into Freddie Kitchens and the Browns winning the Super Bowl.

NFL Power Rankings Week 1
by Robert Ferringo - 9/10/2020

At the end of March, just weeks after The World Shutdown, people were already asking me, “Do you think there will be football this year?” My answer was always the same. And I’ve been unwavering in my belief that the NFL will absolutely, positively play and that we will have a full season. Why this unshakeable confidence? Because if you’ve been living in on paying attention to anything in this country over the last four decades, you would have come face-to-face with one immutable truth: never doubt the willpower of greed.

2020 NFL Power Rankings Post Draft
by Robert Ferringo - 5/1/2020

The NFL oddsmakers have their own version of NFL power rankings: futures odds. Yesterday I took a look at the teams that have seen the biggest movements in their futures odds, both positively and negatively, as a result of free agency and the draft. Those movements give bettors an idea about the direction in which public opinion is trending regarding certain teams. But today I wanted to try to organize the entire league based on how I see their prospects heading into the summer.

NFL Power Rankings Week 17
by Robert Ferringo - 12/24/2019

Merry Christmas! I made the trek north to Upstate New York to spend the holiday season with my family, friends and frigid temperatures. I'm going to keep this week's Power Rankings short and sweet. At this point, we know who everyone is and the hierarchy in the NFL is pretty well established.

NFL Power Rankings Week 16
by Robert Ferringo - 12/17/2019

The Los Angeles Chargers won 11 games last year and entered this season as a Super Bowl sleeper pick. Two weeks ago, they were mathematically eliminated from the postseason. How did they respond? They responded with a complete no-show last week at home against Minnesota. The Chargers turned the ball over seven times and slept their way through their worst blowout loss (39-10) in several years.

NFL Power Rankings Week 15
by Robert Ferringo - 12/10/2019

Life isn't fair. If you still believe that Santa Claus is real, then you may not realize that. For the rest of us, it's just a fact of life. Life isn't fair, and no one ever said it would be. So, no one wants to hear it when things don't break your way. That goes for the New Orleans Saints, who once again were completely screwed by poor officiating in a thrilling loss to San Francisco.

NFL Power Rankings Week 14
by Robert Ferringo - 12/3/2019

In the NFL, this is moving time. This is the time of the year that the top teams maneuver their way to bye weeks and home-field playoff games, positioning themselves for a potential championship run. For the next tier, this is the month in which the contenders and the pretenders sort themselves out as they grasp for those final fleeting playoff slots.

NFL Power Rankings Week 13
by Robert Ferringo - 11/26/2019

It is Thanksgiving week, so I am doing an abridged version of my NFL Power Rankings. But I do want to take this opportunity to point out again that I will be releasing my football selections on Wednesday this week to accommodate the Thanksgiving holiday. That goes for all of Doc's football handicappers, and we want to get our action in early so we can sit back and enjoy an orgy of alcohol, eating and gambling this weekend that would make the Romans blush.

NFL Power Rankings Week 12
by Robert Ferringo - 11/19/2019

Do you remember how early on this season the underdogs were covering the spread at an astronomical and completely unsustainable rate? Well, regression has struck - sort of - and NFL underdogs have been a lot less potent over the last five weeks than in the opening six weeks of the season. Well, some underdogs that is.

NFL Power Rankings Week 11
by Robert Ferringo - 11/12/2019

A tool I have found useful in handicapping college basketball and college football is something I like to call relative conference strength. The basic premise is that you can gauge a team's true strength based on whom they have played and how those teams stack up against the rest of the country. It's a very macro way of looking at the field, rather than focusing on the minutia of matchups and individual players.

NFL Power Rankings Week 10
by Robert Ferringo - 11/5/2019

Despite all of the talk about how the NFL has become primarily a passing league, I have definitely noticed that the pendulum has started to swing back the other way. And now, rather than teams trying to build their rosters and game plans to just outshoot and outscore opponents, we are seeing a return to the fundamental NFL strategy: running the football.

NFL Power Rankings Week 9
by Robert Ferringo - 10/29/2019

Most people I know are in agreement about the product that is NFL football these days: it's pretty awful. The game is a ragged, penalty-filled mess that is routinely interrupted by instant replay reviews, commercials and promotions for network television shows.

NFL Power Rankings Week 8
by Robert Ferringo - 10/22/2019

The NFL has become a game of incompetence. Whether it is officiating errors, coaching and game-management mistakes, or just shockingly poor play, Sundays have become defined by stupidity rather than strategic or athletic excellence. The results have frustrating for bettors, and most professionals I know are starting to dread having to sit through NFL action each week.